How hard is your supplier working for you? - Fedrigoni's Pulp launch party

By Alex Traska
on 4th Dec

In the last few months we've been working with paper merchants, Fedrigoni, on a number of projects. Their enormous range of papers find a home in fine book binding, product packaging, art projects and any number of printed promotional items. The paper can often be the key feature of a project or simply the medium upon which it is reproduced, sitting un-noticed in the background, lending a physical experience to print with the minimum of fuss or applause.

It's wrong to regard a paper mill or distributor simply as a supplier. The best around are every bit as excited about design as the designers to whom they supply. Forge a strong relationship with them and you can regard them as a collaborator. You’re not the only businesses with which they have relationships; they know some of the best printing companies around that get the best from their stocks and print finishers who’ve done mind-bendingly good work on their papers. They’ve been more than happy in our experience to put you directly in touch with the best people to talk to at these companies.

"The cost of paper is one of the least significant costs of a project"

It’s not necessary to be a big spender to form this relationship. You might, in fact, find it difficult to spend large amounts of money with them on smaller creative endeavours, since specifying high-quality and carefully selected stock is not the reserve of high-end, high-budget projects; a truth borne out by a recent project of ours with Rocket at Saltwater.

A warm, sun-shined Wednesday in Clerkenwell, London marked the launch of the new "PULP" magazine from Fedrigoni paper, hosted at their Creative Papers studio. We were invited down after our rep, Mel, dropped into our Nottingham studio simply to see how things were going, what we were up to and to drop off more paper samples we’re dying to use on projects.

Their paper studio works as a creative space for their in-house team as well as clients; they welcome you to invite your own clients into the meeting space to explore their papers and how they’ve added value to other projects. The launch event opened the studio to a huge array of Fedrigoni customers at once, including print designers, architects, magazine publishers and book binders.

Pulp Magazine – a quarterly journal of people and paper

Thefirst issue of the bi-lingual magazine, published in Italy by Fedrigoni, features fascinating profiles of studios and print companies making the most of digital print techniques as well as interviews with contributors to the design world, certainly not limited to designers themselves, and people doing some weird inventive stuff with print (like a custom-built turntable section for a screen print project!). Don’t forget of course that the magazine is an advertising tool for Fedrigoni papers, but it doesn’t ever feel like a sales brochure; there's truly valuable and interesting content, printed onto a wide range of papers in different finishes, perfect bound into an expensive feeling magazine.

It genuinely feels as though Fedrigoni engage not only with their clients but their own product and their suppliers at all levels of their business. Pulp showcases this attitude brilliantly. Speaking to those at the event with a Fedrigoni name badge, it was clear that they were not solely interested in the product from a sales perspective, they cared about it from a creative and even personal point of view. The Creative Papers studio and Pulp magazine is testament to that fact; literally festooned with great examples of design physically reproduced with Fedrigoni papers.